If you go down in the woods today You'd better go in disguise.

Not really in the mood to cook on Friday, so I made Spaghetti, and we had a carpet picnic.

Turns out that's not an ideal dish for carpet picnics when you have a 3 yr old and a 1 yr old. But they thought it was fun, and everyone ate their supper. The dog however, thought this plan was genius, cause she got to play the role of vacuum for the night.

I use a chunky garden style sauce (the more veggies the better for us) and added in 2 small cans of black olives and one large can of mushrooms. Brown the meat with a minced yellow onion and some "italian" herbs, put it all over angel hair pasta. I was out of "sprinkle cheese" and nearly had a mutiny on my hands, thus the carpet picnic.

Saturday we had an actual picnic outside (for lunch) but it was simple PB&J with kiwi slices and oranges, till it got windy and dark and chilly. Then we came inside and finished up in the foyer! DH took us out to our fav Sushi place for supper Sat night, happy tummies all around!

We had big plans Sunday for dinner with my friend and neighbor, potato salad and chicken wings. But that dang Snot Fairy came back to my house over the weekend and attacked my little ones, so I passed out Tylenol and wiped noses Sunday, and ended up exchanging bowls of potato salad for a bowl of chicken wings with the neighbor. During the exchange I ended up eyeballing her can of baked beans (an item I never buy) but was salivating over. Off to my house I went, and to my dismay all I had in my pantry to work with were black beans (normally I only have dry beans, so I was lucky to even have these gems!). Turns out, you can make a pretty tasty baked bean substitute with black beans, here's what I did.

2 cans black beans (and their "juice")
1/4 c brown sugar (I mix both light and dark in my bin, so it's your choice)
5ish drops of liquid smoke
dash ground ginger
2 dashes gourmet hamburger seasoning
GENEROUS squirt of ketchup
1 packet ham flavor

Simmer and reduce down, I didn't let mine reduce as much as I'd have liked because the monsters were getting restless, but it was still tasty.

DD#1 has been asking for queesh, so I'll prolly do that one day this week, and I've been craving pie for a couple weeks now. There are also some pork chops in the freezer whose days are numbered. Oh and it's raining again, so that's nice.